This chapter proposes that the myths of Hephaistos, the ancient Greek god of metalwork and the only physically impaired member of the Olympic pantheon, can provide insights into ancient inspirations for and understandings of assistive technology. It explores the range of different types of assistive technology that impaired and disabled individuals used in classical antiquity to facilitate their physical mobility, covering staffs, sticks, crutches, corrective footwear, extremity prostheses, conveyances, equids, bearers, and caregivers. It notes the frequent association of impairment and technology in classical antiquity. It argues for a reassessment of the suitability of the Medical Model for use in relation to impairment and disability in classical antiquity under certain circumstances.

The cholos which is one of the constitutive features of Hera is at the heart of this chapter, which treats the narratives and traditions which recount conflicts involving the Hera of Zeus and certain of Zeus’s sons (e.g. Herakles, Dionysos, Hephaistos), and where her wrath is decisive for the definition of their divine prerogatives and their full integration into the Olympian order. By challenging some of Zeus’s illegitimate children, Hera works as a power of legitimation, redefining the divine family. In the world of heroes, the angry Hera is an agent of legitimation as well, but also of delegitimation, especially in cases of human sovereignty: her intervention contributes to identifying rulers whose sovereignty is rotten, as is the case with the royal family of Thebes under Oedipus, and that of Iolkos, in the epic of the Argonauts. Her interventions are nothing but actions that take charge of and realise the boulai of all the gods collectively and of her husband in particular. She does this, to be sure, in her own way, as a goddess whose characteristic is constructive opposition, but her anger remains, in the final analysis, at the service of an order guaranteed by Zeus.